"Homing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... homing to England by the Ostend-Dover packet in the April of some five years ago, relished the vagaries of a curious couple who arrived by a later train, and proved to be both of his acquaintance. He had happened to be early abroad, and saw ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... younger than she, but she could trust him not to advertise his advantage. He really was a dear! She hated herself for being jealous of him sometimes. There were things he could do, there were thoughts that came to him as easily as homing birds, which were with her only a pretence: but she pretended eagerly, sincerely, even with prayer. She really yearned to be at heart all that she tried to make Somerled and other people believe her to be. And if she tried hard to be ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... unequal fight continued. It could not last much longer. Despair pulled at the German's heartstrings as he saw his observer topple for a moment in his seat, then pitch forward into space. The biplane tipped dangerously, righted itself and sped like a homing pigeon in the direction of the German lines. There was nothing left but to fly for it. The German dared not look behind; only by the mercy of God were the Frenchman's shots going wild. It could not last; he must get the range. Surely, ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... CHALLONER, HIS MASTER. He began to follow it—slowly at first, as if fearing that it might get away from him. Darkness came, and he was still following it. In the light of the stars he persisted, all else crowded from him but the homing instinct of the dog and the desire for ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... walked slowly up into the main building of the Grand Central Terminal with the crowd. There was chattering all about her—young voices, old voices, laughter, squeals of delight and surprise—all the hubbub of a homing crowd ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... in India. She has laid her spell on certain families; and they have followed one another through the generations, as homing birds follow in line across the sunset sky. And their name becomes a legend that passes from father to son; because India does not forget. There is perhaps nothing quite like it in the tale of any other land. It makes for continuity; for a fine tradition of service and devotion; a ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... from roaming With joy again; Some, who come homing By stealth at gloaming, Had better have stopped Till death, and dropped By strange hands propped, Than come so ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... greatest mercy the day had brought me yet. With less strain on the attention, however, there was more upon the mind. No longer forced to exert some muscle twice or thrice a minute, I had time to feel very faint, and yet time to think. My soul flew homing to its proper prison. I was no longer any unit at unequal strife with the elements; instincts common to my kind were no longer my only stimulus. I was my poor self again; it was my own little life, and no other, that I wanted to go on living; ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... the Cathedral, where the grapes are blessed and all the people pray and give thanks for a good harvest. Then, in the square in front of the Cathedral, a great flock of pigeons is loosed into the air. These are homing pigeons, and they fly back to their homes in every part of Spain, carrying the message that the harvest is about to begin. There's dancing in the streets all night, and the next day there are bullfights, ...
— Getting to know Spain • Dee Day
... bit of the heart they're tied to, an inner bit, aye the innermost bit, the inner heart of the heart. They are the bit pulled, and pulled more, and pulled harder, till the strings grew. Man was born in the warm heart of God. Was there ever such a womb! Was there ever such another borning, homing place! ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... on these Plains of York Swift sped away as speeds the homing hawk, And soon 'twas his to wake that watchman's cry That woke all Nations ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... sent the advance unit out to scout the new planet in the Ambassador, homing down on the secret beeping of a featureless box dropped by an earlier survey party. Then they sat back at GHQ and began the same old pattern of worry that ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... arise when either appeared. Once down from their perch, they would refuse to return until the sun was removed; and when it chanced to be the one on the porch and was switched off, they were unable to return because their endowment of optic nerve was small and their homing instinct, so strong in bees and eagles, smaller. There was created, accordingly, an impasse, but Mr. Sprig, who knew his hens, circumvented it. He lit a bedside candle which merely ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... on January 12 kept us confined for thirty-six hours. It was clear enough after noon on the 13th, and five miles were covered in four hours through thick surface drift. What the course was we did not care as we steered by the sastrugi. If ever a man had any "homing instinct" it would surely show itself on such an occasion ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... the sack; that's what she's going to give him," Conquest said, conclusively, while Miriam folded the dashingly scribbled sheets. "You needn't be worried about her in the least. Miss Evie knows her way about as cleverly as a homing bee. She'll do well for herself whatever else she may not do. ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... thus only is to be explained the phenomenon of migration and also the many other peculiarities in the behaviour of birds whereby approaching changes in the weather may be foretold. Probably, also, this fact has much to do with the extraordinary homing instinct of pigeons. But, of course, in the days when meteorological science had yet to be born, no such explanation as this could be known. The ancients observed that birds by their migrations or ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... triumph, triumph down the scarlet gleaming street; The town was mad, a man was like a boy. A thousand flags were flaming where the sky and city meet; A thousand bells were thundering the joy. There was music, mirth and sunshine; but some eyes shone with regret: And while we stun with cheers our homing braves, O God, in Thy great mercy, let us nevermore forget The graves they ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... its joyful function in spite of restraint. He did not rise at once, but he lay there thinking, trying to force the realization that he was again in San Francisco... He wondered dimly at the power of the homing instinct that had driven him back. It was plain to him now that almost any other environment would have been materially better. He had had the whole state of California to choose from, indeed he might ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... property. Thus law, custom, public sentiment, climate, soil, and production, all combine to give bird-life a development in England that it attains in no other country. In no other land is it so multitudinous and musical; in none is there such ample and varied provision for housing and homing it. Every field is a great bird's- nest. The thick, green hedge that surrounds it, and the hedge-trees arising at one or two rods' interval, afford nesting and refuge for myriads of these meadow singers. The groves ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... that as the sun dipped lower, the sky toward the southwest had been frequently swept by expectant eyes, but supper was served and eaten, and the purple shadows of night began softly to drape the glaring desert and still there came no sign of the homing aeroplane. ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... hegira took place in large numbers, some permanent losses were sure to ensue. The settlers at Blue Lick had experienced this disaster, and had accepted it as partly the result of their own lack of precaution during the homing fancy of the horses. But since the herders manifested so little of the suavity that graces commercial intercourse, and as some of the horses had been seen in their cow-pens, it was a happy thought to feather the ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... on cloud, Came that silent flock of his: Thronging whiteness, in a crowd, After homing twos and threes; With the thronging memories Of all white ...
— The Singing Man • Josephine Preston Peabody
... have read in a book," he said, "and that was told to me, And this I have thought that another man thought of a Prince in Muscovy." The good souls flocked like homing doves and bade him clear the path, And Peter twirled the jangling keys in weariness ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... finally got those things working." Alan smiled slightly. "Guess that means I owe Pete a bourbon-and-soda for sure. Anybody who can build a robot that hunts by homing in on animals' mind impulses ..." He stepped forward just as a roar of blue flame dissolved the branches of a tree, barely ...
— Survival Tactics • Al Sevcik
... hath possessed knoweth no more of roaming; All roads and the flowing of waves and the speediest flight he knows, But wherever his feet are set, his soul is forever homing, And going, he comes, and coming he ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... detaining hand. Her own hands dropped straight at her sides, and the rusty shawl hung free. A second time she turned, the Boy thought to him again; but as he glanced up, wondering, he saw that the fixed yet serene look went past him like a homing-dove. A neglected, slighted feeling came over him. She wasn't thinking of him the least in the world, nor even of the milk he was at such pains to carry for her. What was she staring at? He turned his head ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... by herself, and he suffered damnably. But she never went far—he comforted himself with that assurance. "She has the homing instinct. She won't go without me; and she knows that I can't come—but oh, to be kissing her under those birches by ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... railway and walked the train most of the way. He dropped from the cars at the water tank and struck across country, and again he ran. But this time it was no headlong flight. Straight as a homing bird went Dannie with all speed, toward the foot of ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the changes of temperature as the boat went south, the shoals of porpoises tumbling in the blue water; the strange foods, the passing ships were all amazements to her and the fact that her thoughts had, for the first time, found a tangible resting-place like homing pigeons alighting at their cot, together with her absorption in Louis, all gave her ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... Danish-looking chap was homing towards the door. Without meeting the girl's eyes, he slunk into the doorway. His broad shoulders sagged under his sun-faded coat, and he blocked the light from the glassless window on the staircase as he disappeared. When he slouched out ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... the following day was falling when the homing Andre-Louis approached Gavrillac. Realizing fully what a hue and cry there would presently be for the apostle of revolution who had summoned the people of Nantes to arms, he desired as far as possible to conceal the fact that he had been in that maritime city. Therefore he made a wide detour, ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... her tight, teeth set, as one who would keep his own perforce from that grim fate which would snatch his love from him. She shivered to me half-swooning, pale and of wondrous beauty, nesting in my arms as a weary homing-bird. A poignant grief o'erflowed ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... its valley thickets. The fall of all seeds whatsoever of the forest, now made ripe in their high places and sent back to the ground, there to be folded in against the time when they shall arise again as the living generations; the homing, downward flight of the seeds in the many-colored woods all over ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... In fact, all animals appear to possess it in varying degree; they are all more or less able to find their way home. Yet, study it how we may, we are at fault when we try to account for it. In many cases, the homing instinct is apparently governed by sight; but many scientific observers entertain the idea that the sense of smell, in the majority of instances, will be found to lie at the root of the matter. Possibly ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... six," replied the Bishop, as they stepped on board Lord Downton's beautiful craft, the "Homing Pigeon." ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... Pompey in the yard. He could endure them, now that he was not for ever tumbling over them. Yes, one and all were comfortably established under the new roof—with the exception of poor Palmerston the cat. Palmerston had declined to recognise the change, and with the immoderate homing-instinct of his kind had returned night after night to his old haunts. For some time Mahony's regular evening walk was back to the store—a road he would otherwise not have taken; for it was odious to him to see Polly's neat little ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... God lets drop blue doves which ground the mind Like clover; then, with drawing to the skies, His pleasure is to watch the flocks arise. Here, there, they mount; they show no cloud, no wind, Can hinder homing; and the angels find No transport, like the sight, for, to their eyes, 'Tis more souls for the joy, which glorifies The Father, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... sundown, I see a pair of wild pigeons homing toward the crest of Apo. "Limocons," the Bogobos call them—"leem-o-sahns": the word falls limpid from their lips, unaccented. They say the limocon never was heard to sing in the lowlands, and tell a strange legend that it is an oracle of the Hill People, ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... admirable program, he immediately defied it by making a bee-line for the main hotel, a big board structure still in process of erection. His feet carried him thither in spite of himself. Like a homing-pigeon he went, and instinct guided him unerringly, for he found the ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... him Lite's rifle spoke, its little steelshod message flying straight as a homing honeybee for the spitting flash he had glimpsed up there among the rocks. Whether he did any damage or not, a dozen rifles answered venomously and flicked up tiny spurts of sand in the close neighborhood ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... speed up our recovery missile," Tom explained. "Looks like a slim hope, though, from the way that third blip is homing on target. This other control has just caused every instrument on this ship, and all the others in the task force, to make permanent records on magnetic ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... trajectory of a projectile, and fell at Evreux in safety and beyond the range of the enemy's fire, though not far from their lines. This was on the 23rd of September. Two days afterwards the first practical trial was made with homing pigeons, with the idea of using them in connection with balloons for the establishment of an officially sanctioned post. MM. Maugin and Grandchamp conducted this voyage in the "Ville de Florence," and descended near ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... STORY OF A HOMING PIGEON, I believe present-day requirements have been met, and that the book will prove of real value as a supplementary reader ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... she saw that it was a little yellow dog, with hanging red tongue and eyes bulging in terror. From side to side of the red clay road the creature doubled for a moment in its anguish, and then with a spring, straight as the flight of a homing bird, fled to the shelter of Maria's skirts. Quick as a heart-beat the girl's personal fears had vanished, and as an almost savage instinct of battle awoke in her, she stooped with a protecting movement and, picking the small dog from the ground, held him high above her ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... The words Bring sweet cadence to my ears. Wandering thoughts, like homing birds, Fly all swiftly down the years, To that wide casement, where I always see Bright love-lamps leaning out ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... and Homing Instincts are familiar to every one, but the term Psycho-composite was coined by the writer after much hesitation and with much regret because he seemed unable to find a word which would express ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... Here you are, belonging to a nation with the strongest patriotism! the most inveterate homing instinct in the world! and you pretend you'd rather go anywhere than back to Ireland. You don't suppose I believe you, ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... be privately busy in a backwater when the main stream was spuming and ramping with the great bore of a general election. I have been able to hear the swallows twitter at sunrise in serene unconsciousness of the crisis, to watch the rooks homing at twilight, as though the course of Nature were still the same, and to see the moonlight rippling over the sombre water at midnight in unaffected tranquillity. Myself was scarcely better informed of the tidal flood: stray echoes of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... gave rise to the rumour that the Lord Lieutenant had threatened that if they destroyed any more jails they would be rigorously released. Sinn Fein, which refused to fight Germany, had already begun to play at a new sort of war. Australia was preparing to welcome the homing transports sped with messages of Godspeed ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... roaring on, his machine seemingly feeling like a homing pigeon. He felt a fierce love for that noble hunter. He felt he could almost talk to it and tell it how proud he was of having been able to put it through its paces. Never had there been such ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... among ourselves. There's Tom Chesney to begin with; George Cooper here, who ought to make a pretty fair scout even if he is always finding fault; Carl Oskamp, also present, if we can only tear him away from his hobby of raising homing pigeons long enough to study up what scouts have to know; yourself, Josh Kingsley; and a fellow by the name of Felix Robbins, which happens to ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... burning On the old shrines of home. Our kin Have built them temples, and therein Pray to the Gods we know; and dwell In little houses lovable, Being happy (we remember how!) And peaceful even to death. . . . O Thou, God of all long desirous roaming, Our hearts are sick of fruitless homing, And crying after lost desire. Hearten us onward! as with fire Consuming dreams of other bliss. The best Thou givest, giving this Sufficient thing — to travel still Over the plain, beyond the hill, Unhesitating through the shade, Amid the silence unafraid, Till, at some sudden turn, one ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... walk eastwards. In the darkness of their paper bags, the mere fact that I am moving them gives my prisoners a sense of the direction in which I am taking them. If nothing happened to disturb this first impression, the insect would be guided by it in returning. This would explain the homing of my Mason-bees carried to a distance of two or three miles amid strange surroundings. But, when the insects have been sufficiently impressed by their conveyance to the east, there comes the rapid twirl, first this way round, then that. Bewildered by all these revolutions first in one direction ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... entrance and was heaped between these frail walls; twice a day, with the return of the ebb, the mighty surplusage of water must struggle to escape. The hour in which the Farallone came there was the hour of flood. The sea turned (as with the instinct of the homing pigeon) for the vast receptacle, swept eddying through the gates, was transmuted, as it did so, into a wonder of watery and silken hues, and brimmed into the inland sea beyond. The schooner looked up close-hauled, and was caught and carried away by the influx like a ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or incomings might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the homing pigeon's flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest eye. It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out to, and it needed the anxieties and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... high his wild thought whirled: "Bride, Goddess, Helen, O Wonder of the World, Shall I come for thee?" Her tender words came soft As dropping rose petals on garden croft Down from the wall's sheer height—"Come soon, come soon." And homing to the lines ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... sunset gold. They had taken boat beneath the Keg of Butter Battery, and were sailing for Saaron with a light breeze on their quarter. Evening and Sabbath calm held the sky from its pale yellow verges up to the zenith across which a few stray gulls were homing. From Garland Town, from St. Ann's, from Brefar ahead of them, came wafted the sound of bells, far and faint, ringing to church, and the murmuring water in the boat's wake seemed to take up Vashti's laugh and echo it reproachfully, as she checked herself ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... up on a stepladder laboriously painting the R on THUNDER when old Sudden drove into the yard with half the Rolling R boys packed into the big car. They had heard the strident humming of the plane when Johnny made his homing flight, and craning necks backward, had seen him winging away to the Rolling R. They had guessed very close to the truth, and for them the search ended right there. So, after signalling the other searchers, many of the boys had ridden back in the car, leaving patient, obliging little ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... diverse enough to justify more than one view of the universe; but he had no conception of that concentration of purpose that may make the mind's flight to its goal as direct and unvarying as the course of a homing bird. The talk turning on Gamba, Crescenti spoke of the help which the hunchback gave him in his work among ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... a line the quintette swept along, heading straight as homing pigeons for the Harrowbrook Country Club, where a big delegation of enthusiasts awaited to watch the contestants alight, drink the prescribed cup of coffee, take on gasolene and ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... him, and has a pretty knack of rendering conversation about the weather novel and suggestive. As a boy I won some popularity among my schoolmates as a teller of stories. One afternoon, to a small collection with whom I was homing across Regent's Park, I told the story of a beautiful Princess. But she was not the ordinary Princess. She would not behave as a Princess should. I could not help it. The others heard only my voice, but I was listening to the wind. She thought she loved the Prince—until he had wounded the ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... rod of soil as he retraced his way up that great wind-swept slope, noting every change in vegetation or settlement. Five years before he had crept like a lizard; now he was rushing straight on like the homing eagle who sees his home crag gleam ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... the kind of man who lends himself to being robbed; the real wonder was that it had not been done already. But, mingled with her contempt for his helplessness, Miss Gregory felt a certain softening. His homing instinct, as blind as that of a domestic animal, his rejoicing in his return, his childish plan for taking his mother by surprise, even his loyalty to the tramcars and all the busy littleness of Clapham Junction—these touched something in her akin to the goodness of motherhood. It occurred ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... forms, but it was because the form fitted the poem. In our modern days, we too often, Procrustes-like, make our ideas to fit the forms. We put our guest, the poetic thought, that comes to us like a homing bird from out the mystery of the blue sky—we put this confiding stranger straightway into that iron bed, the "sonata form," or perhaps even the third rondo form, for we have quite an assortment. Should the idea survive and grow too large for the bed, and if we have learned to love it too much to ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... burden of intoxication, they knew the ground by instinct and from long association. They gained on him. Across the way a window-sash went up with a bang, and a woman screamed. Through the only other entrance to the mews a belated cab was homing; its driver, getting wind of the unusual, pulled up, blocking the way, and added his advice to ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the lantern, the girls led the way, and an hour and a half later halted before the door of the Watts cabin, where they became the center of an admiring group of young Wattses who munched their candy soberly as they gazed in reverent awe at the homing argonauts. ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... little stratagem worked admirably. The address which Tim gave young Surface was the address of Mrs. Paynter's, where Surface Senior had lived for nearly three years. And so the young man had gone to his father, straight as a homing pigeon. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... than a head-waiter—for a German riding-master, a leader of a Hungarian band, a manager of a Ritz hotel. But he was not above his station. He even assisted the porter in carrying the coats and golf bags of the gentlemen from the car to the coffee-room where, with the intuition of the homing pigeon, the three strangers had, unaided, found their way. As Carl Schultz followed, carrying the dust-coats, a road map fell from the pocket of one of them to the floor. Carl Schultz picked it up, and was about to replace it, when his eyes were held ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... that through her humbled Triumph-Arch Was doomed to see you tread your fathers' tracks— Paris, your goal, now lies a six days' march Behind your homing backs. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... she planed off a pellet of good sound wood—it looked like a nail-scrape, the mark she made—and masticating it and moistening it with saliva, whirred back like a homing aeroplane to her ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... Frazier, of the American embassy, would be telling an English officer that a captain of his regiment who was supposed to have been killed at Courtrai had, like a homing pigeon, found his way to the hospital at Neuilly and wanted to be reported "safe" at Lloyds. At another table a French lieutenant would describe a raid made by the son of an American banker in Paris who is ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... at a touch, and it was child's work to pick out the moccasin track across the meadow. When the steps reached the beach they were harder to follow. I lost them for a while, though there were scattered pebbles that would have led me straight as a homing pigeon, had I been cool enough in mind to have my eyes and wits as sharp as usual. As it was, I doubled, and squandered time, until the sun began to loom red near the horizon. And all the time I was saying to myself, "It is not true. It is ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... manners were a trifle too casual; at times they irritated Douglas, and if he took the boy into his life as he hoped to, he would come into constant contact with Leslie and her friends, who were cultured people of homing instincts. Mickey's manners must be polished, and the way to do it was not to drop to his level, but to improve Mickey. And again, the day before, he had told Mickey to sit down and wait until an order was given him. To invite him to "get in the game" now, was good alliteration; ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... great rush of pity for those others, the vast and scattered company, mourning, mourning, and yet reaching out in wild hope and desire for their loved ones, whose bodies were all the while here. They did not know, yet hither came winging unerringly, like flights of homing doves, their myriad prayers, their passionate loving thoughts and wistful thirsty longing for one word, one kiss, one touch of the hand.... Surely such thoughts ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... the Currency Lass had thus ended in a stroke of fortune almost beyond hope. She had brought two thousand pounds' worth of trade, straight as a homing pigeon, to the place where it was most required. And Captain Wicks (or, rather, Captain Kirkup) showed himself the man to make the best of his advantage. For hard upon two days he walked a verandah with Topelius, for hard upon two days his partners ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... answered Zinti. "Who am I that I should question your wisdom?" and, turning his horse's head, he rode forward across the gloomy veldt as certainly as a homing rock-dove wings ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... new-homing from far ways On silent wing or spirit wave of air, Came circling o'er his head in hovering maze, Seen not, nor heard, albeit I knew them there; But as each passed before his lifted face, They gleamed to sight, and grace so mounted grace My eyes ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... left behind him an accredited fallacy. Mr. Romanes, if he is not stopped in time, will get the theory connecting heredity and memory into just such another muddle as Mr. Darwin has got evolution, for surely the writer who can talk about "HEREDITY BEING ABLE TO WORK UP the faculty of homing into the instinct of migration," {61b} or of "the principle of (natural) selection combining with that of lapsing intelligence to the formation of a joint result," {61c} is little likely to depart from ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... the Government going to commence operations in connection with the Channel Tunnel?" asks a correspondent in a daily paper. We understand that unless the English homing rabbit, recently released at Calais, puts in an appearance on this side once again, the idea will be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... sonata. Out of doors were all the pleasant sights and sounds of the peaceful evening coming on after the labors of the busy day. The birds were calling to each other in the woods before nesting for the night; the homing rooks flew round and round their trees, cawing loudly; the village dogs barked their welcome to their masters as they came off the fields and the day's work; and the setting sun dyed the autumn leaves a brighter gold, a deeper crimson, a richer russet. It was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... Butler. "She's twice too good for any one of them. Didn't her dress fit neat, Maria? Well, I hope she won't get let in by their fine ways. For my part, I'm not going to take any notice of the Bertrams. The way they behaved was past enduring. Not at homing when I called, and then leaving their cards on the day when I was at the bazaar. Highty-tighty, says I, who's Mrs. Bertram that she should look down on us in this fashion? Isn't the widow of a good honest butter merchant who paid his way, and left a comfortable fortune behind him, fit to ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... slanting through those ancient trees, The sunlit lichens burning on the byre, The lark descending, and the homing bees, Proclaim the sweet relief ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their way back when removed to a distance. It seems at times as if they possessed some extra ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... time," Those who remained behind, sacrificing allegiance to their old flag for the sake of allegiance to the soil, were indeed far happier than the irreconcilables who had elected to return to the motherland, bereft of all but their movable property. And among these homing Frenchmen were some whose reception caused them a very reasonable anxiety. Vaudreuil, Bigot, Pean, Cadet, Varin, Penisseault, and several others who had held offices in Canada, were cast into the Bastille, charged with the corruptions ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... we learn to be satisfied with something nearer than the moon. The horizon of our hopes and ambitions narrows, but the sky above is not less deep, and we make the wonderful discovery that the things that matter are very near to us. It is the homing of the spirit. We have been avid of the "topless grandeurs" of life, and we return to find that the spiritual satisfactions we sought were all the time within very easy reach. And in cultivating those satisfactions intensively we make another discovery. We find ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... names, and so on to assist them. However accurately some people are directed, they appear to have the greatest difficulty in finding their way, while others, more fortunate, remember prominent features on the route, and pick out their course as accurately as does a homing pigeon. ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... words to tell you how, for there are none in any language that I ever knew to tell it; but where I am it is all ear and eye and the rest in one, and there is, oh, how much more besides! Things a homing-pigeon has known, and an ant, and a mole, and a water-beetle, and an earthworm, and a leaf, and a root, and a magnet—even a lump of chalk, and more. One can see and smell and touch and taste a sound, as well as hear ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... and her lighted nights, is changed by her subtle enchantment into a child of the city. He is never free thereafter. The metropolis may send him forth like a carrier-pigeon, and he may think he is well rid of his mistress, but the homing instinct inevitably draws him back. "All other pleasures," as Emerson said of love, "are not worth its pains." Myra thought that she hated New York—the great nervous sea of life, whose noise and stress and tragedy ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... impended vaguely over all the illuminated world, and now and again a flicker of wings through the upper atmosphere betokened the flight of homing birds. Crann gazed about him absently while he permitted the statement he had made to sink deep into the jealous, shrinking heart of the young mountaineer, and he repeated it ...
— A Chilhowee Lily - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... sunshine. There were four arches—though L2000 of the grant had been expended on the poor instead of on temporary decorations. At the Town-Hall an address was received and at the the same time twelve hundred homing pigeons were liberated to carry news of the Royal arrival to all parts of the State. A state banquet followed in the evening and after the Levee on the next day a number of addresses were received. Meanwhile the Duchess visited the ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... seas may have to be gone around, but never once does his sense of direction fail him—the homing instinct is supreme. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... her open arms as straight as a homing pigeon to its nest. "Oh, Aunt Francesca," she sobbed, "will you take me and make ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... the judges about the prize they are going to award; if they are favourable to us, we will load them with benefits far greater than those Paris[308] received. Firstly, the owls of Laurium,[309] which every judge desires above all things, shall never be wanting to you; you shall see them homing with you, building their nests in your money-bags and laying coins. Besides, you shall be housed like the gods, for we shall erect gables[310] over your dwellings; if you hold some public post and want to do a little pilfering, we will give you the sharp claws of a hawk. Are you dining in town, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... was not born within a stone's throw of the Paris fortifications, as her manager would have liked you to believe, but in an indefinite street in Cockneydom, so like its mates that, in the words of Folly herself, she had to have the homing instinct of a pigeon to find it at all. Folly's original name had been—but why give it away? She was one of those women who are above and beyond a name—of a class, or, rather, of a type that a relatively merciful world produces sparingly. She was ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... stillness like a pall, And melancholy silence rules the scene, Save where the bugler sounds his homing call, And thirsty ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... Sense of Birds. We can go no farther than to say that while the homing instinct of certain species of birds is quite well known, the mental process by which it functions is practically unknown. The direction instinct of the homing pigeon is marvelous, but we know that that instinct does not leap full- fledged ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... The homing of the carrier pigeon is a good instance of activity directed in part by an inner adjustment, since, when released at a distance from home, he is evidently "set" to get back home, and often persists and reaches home after a very long flight. Or, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... Pellucidarian is a walking geography of his own district and of much of the country contiguous thereto. It always proved of the greatest aid to Perry and me; nevertheless we were anxious to enlarge our map, for we at least were not endowed with the homing instinct. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... been one of his homing pigeons!" he exclaimed; "perhaps the one that he expected to bring him news from up-river way, about the girl in ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... vessels, that in time of peace rise in irregular but frequent succession above the horizon, covering the face of the deep with a network of tracks. These solitary wayfarers were now to be found only as rare exceptions to the general rule, until the port of destination was approached. There the homing impulse overbore the bonds of regulation; and the convoys tended to the conduct noted by Nelson as a captain, "behaving as all convoys that ever I saw did, shamefully ill, parting company every day." Commodore John Rodgers has before been quoted, as observing that the British practice ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... one or more well-known varieties—pouters, fantails, homing pigeons, etc. Read stories of the training and flights of homing pigeons, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... as the gold, must it pass through the furnace to be made clean. And from the site where in the olden days the men who toiled for the gold were robbed by every device of human guile, a new city would come to be—a great city, proud and prosperous, beloved of homing hearts, and blessed in ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Miranda Duskin The Mystery of Mary Found Treasure Partners A Girl to Come Home To Rainbow Cottage The Red Signal White Orchids Silver Wings The Tryst The Strange Proposal Through These Fires The Street of the City All Through the Night The Gold Shoe Astra Homing Blue Ruin Job's Niece Challengers The Man of the Desert Coming Through the Rye More Than Conqueror Daphne Deane A New Name The Enchanted Barn The Patch of Blue Girl from Montana The Ransom Rose Galbraith ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... was about the mountaineer's homing instinct. I have often noticed it. I could give you fifty instances, only I didn't like to speak of them before Lina. There was Williams, for example, the Dolgelly man who killed a game-keeper at Petworth in a poaching affray; he was taken on Cader Idris, skulking among rocks, a week ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... tears he saw the mirage of his own fireside. Perhaps for the moment his homing spirit rested there, and it was only the body from which the soul had fled that was in the saddle here before us riding through a hostile land. Perhaps more powerfully than the fulminations of any orator had this greeting of a little child operated to smite him with the senseless folly ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... outright: and while he held her thus, meditating a cautious removal of his burden to the sofa, steps in the hall were followed by the appearance of Honor in the doorway: a radiant Honor, aglow with the good news that had brought her straight back to him, like a homing bird. Her small gasp of surprise melted into a smile of amused understanding, as Theo telegraphed wireless messages to her over the golden brown head that was trespassing, flagrantly and confidingly, on her own exclusive ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... simultaneously all/selective WMD launchers, storage/production facilities of a rogue state. - Selectively target rogue terrorist leaders as was apparently done by the Russians in Chechnya recently when they killed the top rebel leader by detecting and homing in on his satellite phone conversation (helicopter rocket attack). - Stop, divert, capture the ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... tower, like some sweet flower, The bell drops petals of the hour, That says the world is homing, My heart puts off its garb of care And clothes itself in gold and vair, And hurries forth to meet her there ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... Well, it is not so bad, If you are feeling a little down, or sad, To walk along Fifth Avenue to the Park, When the day thinks perhaps of getting dark, And meet that mighty flood of vehicles Laden with all the different kinds of swells, Homing to dinner, in their carriages— Victorias, landaus, chariots, coupes— There's nothing like it to lift up the heart And make you realize yourself a part, Sure, of the ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... been fond of her big, blunt cousin, as he of her; and in her present trouble her thoughts flew to him as straight as a homing aeroplane to the landing-stage. ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... next day a dark-green carriage and pair dashed up to Mrs. Dodd's door, and Dr. Short bent himself in an arc, got out, and slowly mounted the stairs. He was six feet two, wonderfully thin, livid, and gentleman-like. Fine homing head, keen eye, lantern jaws. At sight of him Mrs. Dodd rose and smiled. Julia started and sat trembling. He stepped across the room inaudibly, and after the usual civilities, glanced a! the patient's tongue, and touched her wrist delicately. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... down dale he went. Because of the tremendous trees he could not see the sun; yet with the instinct of the woodsman, an instinct as infallible as that of a homing pigeon, he was not puzzled as to direction. Within two hours his long, tireless stride brought him out into a clearing in the valley where his own logging-camp stood. He went directly to the log-landing, where in a listless and half-hearted manner the ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne |
